In Czechoslovakia, 1980, the totalitarian Communist regime demands allegiance from all its subjects, including the clergy. Servants follows Michal and Juraj, two conflicted novitiates whose seminary is under increasing pressure by the Party to mold its students into satisfactory citizens. With the school on the brink of dissolution, and its head priest a target for blackmail, Michal and Juraj will have to choose between collaborating with the government as informants, or becoming targets of the secret police. Shot in striking, atmospheric black-and-white, Servants is both a brooding morality tale and a taut political thriller "that jitters and shivers with anti-authoritarian sentiment beneath its serene monochrome aesthetic" (Variety).
DIRECTED BY IVAN OSTROCHOVSKÝ
SLOVAKIA, ROMANIA, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND | 2020 | SLOVAK WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES
Up Next in Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival)
-
Natural Light
In the occupied Soviet Union during World War II, István Semetka (Ferenc Szabó) is a simple Hungarian farmer who serves as a corporal in a special unit scouting for partisan resistance groups. On their way to a remote village, his company falls under enemy fire and the commanding officer is kille...
-
The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea
In a small eel-farming town in western Greece, the solitary lives of two women unexpectedly intersect. Ten years after a botched anti-terrorism raid resulted in her relocation from Athens, Elisabeth is now the local chief of police and a heavy alcoholic. Rita is a quiet and mysterious eel-hatcher...
-
Hellhole
Three starkly different people deal with the aftermath of the May 2016 terrorist attacks in Brussels. A Flemish doctor, whose son is a fighter jet pilot on a mission in the Middle East, is forced to confront his loneliness. A young man from Algerian descent is asked by his brother to do him a dec...
